Part 1

They call this place a hollow on the maps. County Road 12, a place where the dirt is older than the families, and the families are older than the state lines. My house is just a grayed-out cedar box near the shoulder of that road, a porch that lists to the starboard side, and a screen door that screams every time I open it.

My name is Caleb. I’m twenty-six, and I feel older than the trees.

I wake before the sun, make coffee in a pot my dad left behind—dented and stained, just like his memory. Then I go fix what’s broken. Fences, pumps, roofs, transmissions. The kind of work that digs into your hands and under your nails, the kind of work that’s supposed to let you sleep at night.

It doesn’t always work.

I first saw her on a Tuesday, the sky the color of ash and wet wool. I was walking home from the Jensen place, my heavy toolbox thunking against my hip, a rhythm I’d known my whole life.

A voice cut through the silence. Not a hollow voice. It was clear, sharp, and it didn’t belong.

“Excuse me—could you help me with my gate?”

She was standing there, a hand shading her eyes, leaning against the sagging cedar gate that marked the edge of the old Miller property. Nobody had lived there for a decade. Now, she did.

She could have been in her early forties. She could have been older. The city ages people differently. Her hair had a ribbon in it, lavender, which seemed ridiculous out here. But her white button-down shirt was smudged with dirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, revealing forearms that weren’t used to this kind of life.

Her eyes were hazel and steady, and they watched me with an intensity that was unsettling. Like she was calculating me.

“Leah Monroe,” she said, offering a name that sounded expensive.

“Caleb,” I said, tipping the brim of my cap, a habit my dad beat into me. “Give me an hour.”

It was a simple fix. One hinge rusted clean through, the main post rotted at the base. It wasn’t just broken; it was neglected. I had a spare piece of cedar in the truck from a job I’d finished last week.

While I worked, she didn’t hover, but she didn’t leave. She watched the clouds, the field, the road. Sometimes, I’d feel her eyes on my back. When I’d look up, she’d look away, like a bird startled off a wire.

I dug the new posthole with the old auger, my shoulders burning. I set the post, mixed the concrete by hand in a bucket, pried, and hammered until the new post sat true. I re-hung the gate. It swung smooth and silent.

I was wiping the sweat and sawdust from my hands, packing up my tools, when she spoke again. Her voice was lower this time, almost conspiratorial.

“You deserve a little extra reward,” she said.

I froze. My hand on the latch of my toolbox.

It was the way she said it. Not like a neighbor. Not like Mrs. Jensen offering lemonade. It was said with no flourish, a sentence offered and then left to settle in the air between us, heavy and strange.

I looked at her. Her face was calm, but her eyes… her eyes were terrified.

I let out a slow breath. “Ma’am, I just fix things.”

“If I bake an apple pie sometime, you won’t say no, will you?” she asked, the question a sudden, jarring pivot to normalcy.

I gave a crooked half-laugh, the tension in my shoulders easing, but not all the way. “Pie’s hard to turn down.”

I left her standing by her new, solid gate, a small figure against the vast, empty field. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that the gate wasn’t meant to keep animals in. It was meant to keep someone out.

After that, the “reward” became a ritual. A week later, she knocked on my fence line. A pump in her shed had died.

“Ten minutes,” I told her.

Ten minutes turned into three hours. The pump was an ancient model, seized with rust. While I worked in the dim, musty shed, she brought me a thermos of coffee. Not hollow coffee, not the watery-thin stuff. This was dark, rich, and smelled like things I couldn’t afford. She also brought a sandwich, sliced and handed to me without ceremony.

Her kitchen, which I could see from the shed door, smelled like basil and fresh bread. She’d started a garden. Tomatoes, tiny jars of honey, makeshift beehives in a fenced-off patch behind the house. It was like she was trying to build a new life from a catalog.

“You from the city,” I stated, not a question.

She polished a glass, her back to me. “Seattle.”

“Big change.”

She turned, her hands gripping the dishrag. “Burnout,” she said simply. But the word sounded practiced, like a lie she’d told herself until it felt true. “Sold what I had. Drove until the mountains looked right.”

That picture didn’t fit. It didn’t fit the woman who, two weeks later, stood on my porch at midnight, soaked to the bone, clutching a wicker basket to her chest.

A storm had rolled in, the kind that tries to tear the sky in half. The power had been out for an hour.

When I opened the door to her frantic knocking, she just stood there, rainwater dripping from her hair, mascara running in two black streaks down her cheeks. She looked like a ghost.

“Power’s out,” she stammered, her voice shaking. “I… I baked an apple pie. But I have no light to see if it’s done.”

She came in like a stray, leaving a puddle on my floor, her scent—lavender and rain and something metallic, like fear—filling my small house. I handed her a towel.

She laughed once, a small, startled, broken sound. We ate that half-cooked, warm pie standing at my counter, the house lit only by the orange glow of the woodstove and a kerosene lamp I dug out of the closet.

The crust flaked between my fingers. The filling burned the roof of my mouth. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted.

“We’re eating like two people who are starving,” she said later, her voice a whisper.

“You bake like this all the time?” I asked, my mouth full.

“Only when I’m avoiding something,” she answered, her eyes fixed on the flickering lamp. “Or when I want to say thanks without saying it.”

Thanks for a gate that held. For a pump that worked. For a light left on in the night.

For company, maybe.

I didn’t know how to accept the thanks. So I just nodded, and we stood in the dark, in the quiet, while the storm tried to claw its way inside.

Part 2

The morning after the storm, the world felt scoured clean and broken. Tree limbs were scattered across the road like skeletons. I woke up on the couch, the kerosene lamp having burned itself out.

She was gone.

For a second, I thought I’d dreamed it—the midnight pie, the mascara streaks, the smell of wet lavender. But the pie tin was on the counter, washed. And next to it, the towel I’d given her, folded neatly.

I picked up the towel. It was still damp. I stood there for a long time, just holding it, the silence of the house pressing in on me. I was used to silence, but this felt different. This was an absence.

I threw the towel in the laundry bin and went to work. I had to clear the limbs off the Jensen’s driveway before I could even think about the transmission on Mr. Gable’s tractor.

My life is a loop. Wake, fix, sleep. Repeat. In between, I drive. I drive to the city, to the gray hospital building where my mom lives now. She’s in the “memory care” wing, which is a polite way of saying she’s disappearing in front of my eyes.

I went that Friday. The drive is two hours, and I spent it thinking about Leah’s pie.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, walking into her room. It smelled like bleach and sadness.

She was looking out the window. “Robert, you fixed the fence, didn’t you? The cows keep getting out.”

Robert was my dad. He’s been gone ten years.

“Yeah, Mom. I fixed it,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck.

“You’re a good boy, Caleb,” she said, her eyes clear for just a second. “Don’t let this place trap you. Your father… he loved this land, but it wore him down to a nub.”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“No, you’re not,” she said, her gaze drifting back to the window. “You’re just like him. You think if you can fix everything for everyone else, you won’t be broken yourself.”

The words hit me like a hammer. I didn’t have an answer for that. I just held her small, papery hand until she fell asleep, and then I drove back to the hollow, the silence of the truck feeling heavier than usual.

Leah and I fell into a strange, unspoken rhythm. I’d find a jar of honey on my porch rail, the glass still warm. In return, I’d leave a crate of split oak by her door, stacked neat. She’d bring me coffee when she saw me working on my truck engine, and I’d pretend I hadn’t seen her watching me from her window for ten minutes before she came over.

One afternoon, I was trying to sort out the mess of paperwork for my mom’s insurance. It was a stack of forms and threats from a collections agency, all legal jargon that made my head spin. I was on the porch, my hands covered in axle grease, swearing at a piece of paper.

Leah walked up, holding a basket of tomatoes. “Bad day?”

“Just… paper,” I grunted. “Rather rebuild a carburetor.”

She hesitated, then sat on the step below me. “Let me see.”

I handed her the papers, embarrassed. “It’s for my mom. They’re saying the ‘long-term-care’ isn’t… I don’t know. They just want more money.”

I expected her to nod, to say “that’s a shame,” like everyone else.

Instead, she read the letter. Her whole posture changed. The “burnout” gardener disappeared, and someone else took her place. Someone sharp.

“They’re stalling,” she said, her voice flat and cold. “This is a standard denial. They’re citing provision 4.A, but they’re misapplying the state mandate 203.B. They’re hoping you’ll just pay.”

I just stared at her. “What?”

She pulled a pen from her hair ribbon. “Do you have a phone?”

For the next hour, I sat on my own porch and watched this woman I barely knew dismantle a multi-billion-dollar insurance corporation. She was polite. She was ruthless. She used phrases like “bad faith negotiations,” “fiduciary duty,” and “escalating to the commissioner.”

By the end of the call, the representative on the other end sounded like he was going to cry. The claim was approved. The collections threat was gone.

She hung up and handed me my phone, her knuckles white.

“Leah… how did you do that?”

She visibly deflated, the “gardener” returning. She picked up a tomato and rubbed a smudge off it. “My old job. I managed clinics. I… I was the one who wrote policies like that.”

She looked up at me, and her eyes were full of a shame I didn’t understand. “I was good at it.”

“You… you’re amazing at it,” I said, my voice rough.

“No,” she said, standing up abruptly. “It was just a different kind of fixing. I broke things, too. I broke a lot of things.”

She left the basket of tomatoes and walked back to her house without another word. And I was left with a solved insurance problem and a hundred new questions. Who was this woman?

The harvest fair was when the world I knew and the world she’d fled collided.

It was a Saturday. The air was crisp, smelling like damp leaves and diesel. She showed up at my place before dawn, a thermos of that dark coffee in her hands and a quiet grin.

“You’re going to win,” she said, pointing to my giant, ugly squash.

“It’s not about winning, Leah. It’s about beating old man Jensen.”

She laughed, a real, full laugh that made my chest feel light. She helped me stack squash and potatoes in neat pyramids on my truck bed. She moved through the crowd at the fair like she’d done it her whole life—charming the old ladies, slipping an extra apple into a kid’s bag, laughing at Jensen’s terrible jokes.

I watched her from the corner of my eye. I was watching a comet, something beautiful and bright and completely out of reach. I felt a warmth in my chest I hadn’t felt since before my dad died, a dangerous, stupid warmth.

That’s when he found her.

He didn’t belong. He was the kind of man who doesn’t exist in the hollow. Silver at the temples, a blazer that probably cost more than my truck, and an easy, polished smile that seemed bought and paid for.

He saw Leah and his smile widened, but his eyes went cold. He was a predator who had just spotted his prey.

“Leah Monroe,” he said, his voice loud enough for the pumpkins to hear, a voice that expected to be obeyed. “From Seattle. My god, I thought that was you. Playing farmer? It’s adorable.”

Leah froze.

I mean, she froze. The color drained from her face. The half-eaten apple in her hand slipped from her fingers and hit the dusty ground.

“Richard,” she said, her voice a thin, brittle thing.

He stepped into our space, ignoring me completely. He put his hand on the small of her back, a gesture that was both intimate and controlling. “Everyone’s been asking where you disappeared to. I had to call in a lot of favors to find this… place.”

His eyes swept over the fair, over the tractors and the 4-H pigs, with a look of complete disdain.

“Leah, honey, the game is over,” he said, his voice dropping, silky and menacing. “We have the gala next month. The board is restless. You’re coming home.”

He wasn’t asking. He was telling.

“I… I’m not, Richard,” she stammered, trying to pull away.

“Don’t be silly,” he laughed, but it was a cold sound. “You can’t seriously prefer this… this pig-pen to what we had? To what you are? You’re Leah Monroe. You close eight-figure deals before breakfast. You’re not a… a beekeeper.”

He finally looked at me, his gaze sweeping from my dirty boots to my baseball cap. “And who’s this? The local help?”

The shame was so hot, so sudden, it choked me. I’m a man who fixes things, but in that moment, I was just a broken part. I was the dirt under his polished shoe. I looked at Leah, and she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“He’s my neighbor,” she said, her voice small.

“Right,” Richard sneered. “Well, ‘neighbor,’ if you’ll excuse us. Leah and I have to discuss our portfolio.”

He tugged her arm. “We’re leaving. I have a car waiting. We can have your… things… shipped.”

“No!” she said, pulling her arm back. “I’m not going.”

His smile dropped. For half a second, I saw the real man underneath. He was angry. He was furious.

“Don’t make a scene, Leah,” he hissed, his voice dangerously low. “You know you can’t win. You’re in breach. You know what’s at stake.”

He leaned in and whispered something I couldn’t hear. But I saw her face. All the color, all the life, just… went. She looked like my mom when she couldn’t remember my name.

He smiled, satisfied. “I’ll be at your house tonight to pack. We’ll talk then.”

He gave her a kiss on the temple, a gesture of pure ownership, and then he was gone. He walked through the crowd, and people just parted for him.

The air tilted. The warmth I’d felt was gone, replaced by something cold and heavy.

It wasn’t just jealousy. It was distance. It was the sudden, brutal realization that the woman who burned apple pie and left jars of honey on my table had once stood in rooms where the stakes were higher than I could even imagine.

She was still standing there, staring at the spot where he’d been.

“Leah?” I said.

She jumped, startled. She looked at me, really looked at me, and her eyes were full of pity. And that was worse than the shame.

“Caleb, I…”

“It’s fine,” I said, my voice like gravel. “Gotta go. Mrs. Gable’s squash looks… threatening.”

I disappeared. I didn’t just walk away; I fled. I left my squash, my truck, everything. I walked the long way home, my hands clenched into fists.

I got to my woodshed and grabbed the axe. I found the biggest, gnarliest log of oak I had, and I slammed that axe into it until my shoulders caught fire and my lungs burned and the sun started to bleed into the horizon.

I split that log. I split every log. I worked until the blisters on my hands broke and bled, the salt and sweat stinging in the cuts.

I was chopping wood, but I was seeing his face. The polished smile. The hand on her back. The local help.

I was seeing my mom’s empty eyes. I was seeing the stack of bills. I was seeing a man who could fix anything except his own damn life.

And I was seeing her. The woman who could take down an insurance company with a phone call but crumpled like paper when he showed up.

I’d fixed her gate. But he had the key.

We stopped talking for three weeks.

It was a dry spell, a frost that came too early. It was the loudest silence I’ve ever known.

I worked. I buried myself in it. I re-roofed the Gables’ barn in two days, a job that should have taken a week. I worked from sunup to sundown, pushing my body until my mind went quiet. My hands were raw, my back ached, but it was better than thinking.

I told myself I didn’t care. She was his world, not mine. She was a city woman playing a game, and the game was over.

But every morning, I’d walk onto my porch and my eyes would go straight to her gate. It was always closed.

I saw his car. A sleek, black Mercedes that looked obscene parked on the gravel road. It was there. Then it was gone. Then it was back.

The hollow talked. Mrs. Jensen, dropping off a check, said, “That poor Miss Monroe. Got a fella from the city visiting. Seems… intense. Yells a lot.”

I just grunted and tightened a bolt. Not my business.

One night, I was driving back from my mom’s. It was late, past midnight. The hospital had been bad. Mom was agitated, didn’t know me at all, and it had hollowed me out. I was tired, bone-tired, and just wanted to fall into bed.

I passed Leah’s place. The Mercedes was there, parked at a weird angle, blocking her truck.

And all the lights in her house were on.

I should have kept driving. My dad always said, “Don’t go borrowing trouble, Caleb. You’ve got enough of your own.”

But I slowed down. I cut my engine and coasted.

And I heard it.

Shouting. A man’s voice, Richard’s, tight and controlled, even in anger. “You can’t be this stupid, Leah! You signed the papers. Everything you have, everything you think you’ve built here… it’s mine. The house, the money. You.”

And then I heard her. “It was never about the money, Richard! It was about this!” A sound of breaking glass. A plate, maybe. “It was about breathing! You’re suffocating me!”

“You want to breathe?” he roared, and the control was gone. “You want to breathe?”

I was out of my truck before I knew it, moving silent on the grass, keeping to the shadows. I got to the fence line, my heart hammering a hole in my chest.

Through her kitchen window, I saw them.

He had her backed against the counter. He had her by the arms, his grip so tight her face was pale with pain.

“I made you,” he spat, his face inches from hers. “You were nothing. A clinic manager with ideas. I gave you the world!”

“You gave me a cage,” she whispered, tears streaming down her face.

“And you’ll go back to it,” he said. He shook her, a violent, rattling shake. “You’ll get in the car, you’ll go to the gala, you’ll smile, and you’ll fix this.”

“No.”

“What did you say?”

“No,” she said, louder.

He raised his hand.

I was over the fence. I don’t remember climbing it. I just remember the splinter of the wood in my palm as I vaulted it.

I hit the porch steps at a run.

The sound must have stopped him. He let her go. She crumpled to the floor.

He turned and saw me in the doorway, a shadow against the light.

“Who the hell are you?” he said, straightening his blazer, pulling his civilized mask back on.

“Get out,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own. It sounded like something old and rusted.

He laughed. “Or what? You’ll… you’ll fix my tractor?”

“I said. Get. Out.”

He looked at me. He looked at Leah, crying on the floor. He looked at his own hand, still raised. He saw the calculation. A fight. A messy, small-town… incident. Witnesses.

“This isn’t over, Leah,” he said, stepping over her. He pointed a finger at me. “You’ve made a mistake, farm boy.”

He walked out. I stood there, shaking, my hands clenched so tight my raw knuckles were bleeding again.

I heard the Mercedes start, gravel spitting as he peeled out.

And then it was just me and her, and the sound of her sobbing in the wrecked kitchen.

I should have gone in. I should have helped her up. I should have said… something.

But I looked at her, this brilliant, broken woman, and I looked at my own bloody hands.

I’m the man who fixes things.

But I was too late. I hadn’t fixed it. I hadn’t prevented it. I had just… shown up at the end.

I turned around. I walked off the porch, climbed back over my own fence, and went home. I washed my hands at the kitchen sink, watching the pink water spiral down the drain. I had failed.

On the twenty-second day of silence, she was waiting for me.

I’d just gotten home, covered in grease from the Gable tractor. She was standing in the middle of the road, blocking my truck.

I stopped, the engine idling.

She walked to my driver’s side window. She looked… terrible. Her eyes were red-rimmed and hollow. There was a faint, fading bruise on her cheek, the one I hadn’t seen in the shadows. She was caked in dirt.

She was holding a wicker basket.

“First harvest,” she said, her voice hoarse.

She held up the basket. It was full of the most pathetic, crooked, knobby carrots I had ever seen. They were still warm with soil.

My throat tightened. I felt like a damn fool.

She just stood there, holding this offering, this basket of failures. Our fingers brushed as I took it from her. Neither of us pulled away.

“He’s gone,” she said, not looking at me.

I nodded. I knew. The Mercedes hadn’t been back in three days.

“He… he came back the next day. After…”

“I know,” I said.

She finally looked at me, and her eyes were a raw, open wound. “You saw. You were there.”

“I… I heard,” I said.

“And you left.”

It wasn’t an accusation. It was a fact. It hit me harder than Richard’s fist ever could have.

“Yeah,” I said, the word tasting like rust. “I left.”

“Why?”

I turned off the truck. The sudden silence was deafening.

“Because,” I said, my voice rough, “I don’t know how to fix that, Leah. I can fix a post. I can fix a pump. I can’t… I can’t fix him. I can’t fix what he did.”

“I know,” she said, so softly I barely heard her. “That’s why I had to.”

I looked at her.

“He came back,” she said, her voice gaining a thin, reedy strength. “He had papers. Lawyers. He was going to take the house. He said I was… unstable. That I was in breach of… of everything.”

She took a shaky breath. “So I gave him what he wanted.”

“You… you’re going back?” My stomach dropped.

“No,” she said. She smiled, but it was a grim, broken thing. “I gave him the company. The shares. The portfolio he was so worried about. All of it. Everything he thought I’d come back for.”

“But… Leah, that’s…”

“It was just money, Caleb. It was just a different kind of cage. I told him to take it. And in return, he signs the papers. The non-disclosure, the severance, all of it. And he never, ever comes back here.”

I stared at her. The woman who had built an empire, and the woman who had just given it away for a patch of dirt and some crooked carrots.

“He… he took it?”

“Like a starving dog,” she said. “He thinks he won. He thinks I’m broken. He thinks I’m a fool.”

She reached into the basket and pulled out a carrot. “He doesn’t understand, does he?”

“Understand what?”

“This,” she said, holding up the tiny, twisted carrot. “This is real. I grew this. It’s ugly, and it’s not worth anything, but it’s mine. That… that’s a reward, isn’t it?”

I didn’t have any words.

“Coffee?” I asked, because it was the only bridge I had.

We sat on the top step of my porch, the basket of carrots between us. We drank steaming black coffee from my dented thermos. The chickens clucked. The sun warmed the wood.

“If I said I wanted that gate open from now on,” she said, staring into her cup, “would you let me through?”

I looked at her. Really looked. The faint lines around her eyes, the dirt, the fading bruise, the way her mouth softened when she was nervous.

She was both the red-dress woman and the tomato-talking woman. She had chosen the land, the bees, the pie, as if picking a way to breathe.

I reached out and took her hand. Her skin was cool, and then it warmed.

“It’s not my gate to close,” I said.

We never labeled what we had. Love in the hollow doesn’t come with labels. It comes with coffee handed over without words and pies baked during power outages and gates that stay unlatched.

Life settled into a new kind of quiet. A quiet that wasn’t empty.

She started to change. Or maybe, she just started to become who she was. The city slick was gone. She wore flannel and jeans, her hair in a simple braid. But the sharpness was still there, in her eyes.

She came with me to see my mom.

I didn’t ask her to. I was on the porch, checking my tires, dreading the drive. She just walked over.

“Room for one more?” she asked.

The drive was quiet. When we got to the hospital, I warned her. “She’s… she’s not always there, Leah.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

We walked into the room. My mom was having a good day. She was sitting up, looking at an old photo album.

“Caleb,” she said, smiling. “You brought a friend.”

“Hey, Mom. This is Leah. My neighbor.”

“Hello, Leah,” my mom said, her eyes clear. “It’s nice to see a new face.”

Leah didn’t treat her like she was sick. She didn’t talk down to her. She just pulled up a chair. “That’s a beautiful photo, Mrs….”

“Just Mary,” my mom said. “This was Robert. My husband. He was a good man. Stubborn. Like this one.” She jabbed a finger at me.

Leah laughed. “He comes by it honest, then.”

They talked for an hour. Leah told her about the bees. My mom told her about her roses. They talked about recipes, and canning, and the way the hollow used to be. For an hour, my mom was just… Mom.

When it was time to go, my mom grabbed Leah’s hand. “You’re good for him,” she whispered, loud enough for me to hear. “He’s been fixing everyone else’s life for so long, he’s forgotten to build his own.”

I looked away, my throat tight.

We were in the truck, driving back, the sun setting in a blaze of orange and purple.

“Thank you,” I said.

“For what?”

“For… that. For seeing her.”

“She’s a wonderful woman, Caleb.”

We drove in silence for a while.

“He’s wrong, you know,” she said, her voice quiet.

“Who?”

“Your dad. Or… what your mom said. About being worn down. Fixing things… it’s not a weakness.” She looked over at me, her hazel eyes soft in the dashboard light. “It’s a gift. You put things back together. You make them work. Not everyone can do that.”

I just kept my eyes on the road, because I didn’t want her to see the gratitude, or the… the something… that was building in my chest.

Winter came, and the sky closed in tight. We stacked wood together, a silent, easy team. We learned the best way to bank a stove so it held heat through the night.

We fell into a life. It wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t the city. There were no eight-figure deals.

There were plates left on porches. Jars of honey. Sandwiches that tasted like something you remembered.

Some nights, we sat on her porch swing, a blanket over both our knees, watching the stars, not needing to talk. Other nights, we worked in her garden, our hands in the dirt, planning for the spring.

One evening, I came home, exhausted and smelling like antiseptic. Another bad day at the hospital. I was just… empty.

She was sitting on my porch steps.

She didn’t say, “How was it?” She didn’t say, “I’m sorry.”

She just stood up and held out a small, wrapped tin.

“Thought you might like some for that coffee you live on,” she said.

“I live on it so I can keep up with you,” I replied, my voice rough.

She smiled, a real smile, the kind that reached her eyes. “You deserve a little extra reward,” she reminded me, pressing the tin into my hands.

Inside was a slice of apple pie, wrapped in wax paper.

“For fixing the gate,” she added.

“I don’t fix for rewards,” I said, but I held the tin like it was fragile.

“Maybe not,” she answered, leaning her head on my shoulder, right there on the porch. “But rewards are nice.”

The gate still creaks. I could fix it, plane it down, oil the hinges. But I don’t. It’s our sound. It’s the sound of her coming over. It’s the sound of me heading home.

We leave it unlatched. On purpose. A promise without punctuation.

Sometimes I think of Richard, in his city, with his money, and his cage. He thinks he won. He thinks he took everything from her.

He has no idea.

I looked at Leah, her head on my shoulder, the smell of lavender and woodsmoke in her hair. I looked at the pie tin in my hands.

My mom was right. I spent my whole life fixing things for other people.

But this… this was the first thing I ever built.